This suggestion depends on your skill level and desire to be completely free of corporate bs.

The ‘smart’ is already in home assistant. You do not need a smart thermostat at all. Instead you need temperature/humidity sensors and actuators for your HVAC system. There are several decent smart climate control integrations already and a library for PID control if you want to make your own control automations.

Of all the smart things out there, a thermostat is completely unnecessary. The only solid reason to buy one is convenience, if one is just not into thinking about it too much.

If privacy and autonomy are a priority, however, this is low-hanging fruit to declare independence from corporates who like to rummage through your underwear drawer.

Just lead by example. Use Linux silently right in front of them, in public even. Make lingering eye contact as necessary.

Excellent advice. It’s a game of cat and mouse (or whack-a-mole, whatever metaphor works…).

Sites that want your data for whatever reason hate VPNs, so they identify exit points and blacklist traffic from them. VPN providers know this so they spin up new exit points with different IP.

Just try a different server. Sometimes it’s a regional ’rights’ issue, so pick another server that is in the same jurisdiction, for instance in the case of streaming.

I think the best question to ask first is ‘what kind of server?’

A web server could run a reasonably busy low-tech web2.0 blog site on a phone, I think without breaking a sweat.

Other types of serving (media, especially) would be resource limited) maybe not.

And there is an important difference between ’novelty’ and ‘demo’. Even a novelty server can demonstrate new ways to think about tech. Maybe an author could host their book launch on such a setup, serving only a single file and showing that we don’t exactly need to involve Amazon. That’s where my head goes when thinking about these efforts.

Super cool project. I visited, and I hope you keep building the site stats views out. So many people are curious about self hosting and solar, if you just kept it as a demo that shows how the system holds up over longer term, well I know I would appreciate occasional reminders to check it out. It may inspire others to try similar things.

And I would have happily signed any digital wall you implemented.

That’s about all I have found it good for too. Larger projects need solid architecture that the coder understands well. If you leave architectural decisions to LLM, they build some real janky solutions that take more time to sus out and correct than it takes to just so do it yourself.

It is sad but true. I am USAian, and it is a constant battle with co-workers to get them to stand up even a little against dumb mandates. It’s especially frustrating because EVERY DAMN TIME we do push back, management backs down. You’d think they would see the pattern…

I swear I showed you the well-marked breaker box when you moved in. smh your head

This is the way. The ‘smart’ is already in home assistant. You need a temp sensor (or a few) and the actuators to trigger the HVAC equipment. There are numerous ‘smart thermostat’ integrations already and modules that handles the PID math for those who want to roll their own.

Any third party product with code you can’t inspect or replace is less secure. In this case, there is no compelling case for a commercial product.

Here’s the original publication for those wanting more implementation details.

The original publication

Extruded aluminum of that type is insanely stable and easy enough to build for a reasonably handy person.

You only need a cheap cutoff saw and a drill, or you can order pre-cut and ore-drilled pieces to order.

There are a number of makers of extruded aluminum building systems, basically tinkertoys for adults. I have personal experience using 80/20 and the Tslots brands. They are functionally identical.

I have used it to build stands for heavy equipment like ultra-cold freezers for labs. It is more than sufficient for any server racking.

Yeah, what’s this meme about? I use Docker on a pi 4 with 8gb of ram to run Home Assistant and Paperless-ngx, plus some simple out-of-container home network monitoring scripts. The little guy rarely uses all the cores.